Bug Description

Every time I restart my computer the 'bindings' set up during the session are not saved. Example:

Set up upper right corner of screen to trigger 'expo mode' (super + w) with mouse pointer. I use CCSM for that.
In CCSM go to window management menu, Scale submenu and bindings tab.
Select upper rigt corner in Initiate Window Picker for all windows. It works fine.
Restart your system.
Open a few windows and try to trigger expo mode with upper right corner with mouse pointer. It does not work.
Go back to CCSM, option is still selected there but does not work.
Have to reset setting and select again to have it working every time i restart.

Try to change the system language to English (United Kingdom). Then CompizConfig can remember that I assign the Scale-funktion to TopRight corner.
But when I change back to Danish or Esperanto as system-wide language, then Compiz stops remembering the Scale-funktion.
Can it be a translation problem?

Even with English (United Kingdom) as a language it doesn't work for me. Unity does not remember Show Desktop at the BottomRight key on startup. fix #3 worked for my scale plug-in but show desktop is not a plugin. any help on this?

If it may help, I use Alt+F2 and "unity --replace" every time I restart and it seems to work. It's faster than going back to CCSM.
By the way, disabling the "Launcher capture mouse" didn't have any effect here.

@vanvugt: will this include a fix of the show desktop binding? There is still neither a fix nor a workaround (except compiz/unity --replace at startup) for the show dektop binding, because it is not a plugin which one can change in the gconf list mentioned in post #3.

The fact that Comment #3 works most likely means that when the Unity plugin is loaded, it rewrites the settings/keybindings to some kind of (hardcoded?) default setting. Why should it be doing this? Shouldn't it respect the user's preferences and not rewrite the keybindings unless specifically told to do so (by pressing a Reset to Defaults button)?

In the case that certain settings or bindings might conflict with the operation of Unity (which doesn't seem to be the case here), then the right thing to do would be to have a dialogue pop up, informing users of the conflict, rather than silently changing settings to make things work with Unity.

The gconf workaround does not work in 12.10 because there is no /apps/compiz-1/general/screen0/options/active_plugins key in gconf-editor it seems to be in /apps/compizconfig-1/profiles/Default/general/screen0/options but no unityshell is listed in active_plugins..

my old config-files still fix the error, but I cannot configure it freshly

I recently installed 12.04.1 and immediately upgraded to Quantal. I see both keys mentioned in comment #27, /apps/compiz-1/general/screen0/options/active_plugins and also /apps/compizconfig-1/profiles/Default/general/screen0/options (without unityshell listed)

Just a few days ago I found this bug report and changed it in /apps/compiz-1/..., which worked and continues to work so far. I'm not sure if at that time I also saw the /apps/compizconfig-1/... already, but I doubt it. Maybe something changed during the past few days?

I think I've found the way to have the scale preferences set with CCSM sticky across sessions with a freshly 12.10 installation. Basically, this is the same workaround than the one suggested in comment #3, except that we have to use Gsettings, with dconf-editor, instead of Gconf with gconf-editor (it seems that in 12.10, Unity and Compiz have migrated from Gconf to Gsettings). So here's how it works:

First, install dconf-editor: sudo apt-get install dconf-tools

Than, start dconf-editor and find this key: org/compiz/profiles/unity

Finally, just put the "scale" value completely at the end of the list of the plugins (be careful to put the coma and spaces exactly at the right place).

Of course, this is just a workaround and this bug still needs to be fixed. The basic and obvious way would be to make sure that users CCSM custom settings are always respected, unless they are really incompatible with Unity settings. But since Ubuntu/Unity already provide scale functions with the super-w key combo, the best way would be to integrate some scale activation by mouse/button within Unity itself, i.e. maybe in relation with the Launcher.

I had the same issue on 12.04, I was able to fix the scale windows problem with the steps on comment #3, however, the Show desktop is not working after a restart, I then installed 12.10 and the show desktop issue persists, is it going to be a permanent fix in near future? Thanks!

@Lionel: In my case, the dconf modifications works well with fresh 12.10 settings, keeping the scale function available to be activated at bottom right corner. Only after some upgrades did the settings stop working but it went back after reactivation with CCSM and it is persistent across sessions..

Unfortunately, I doubt this is considered a priority bug... Maybe it should, in order to compensate for the fact that, right now, Unity may be a great shell for a lot of people (that's my case), but it provides few customization options, making Compiz/CCSM options really desirable for many users.

Fixed the issue for me, in Ubuntu 12.04 64bit. For those that are saying it's not working for them, make sure you have "Ubuntu-Tweak" installed. I recall in researching this issue, coming across a claim that a dependent package installed with Ubuntu Tweak, corrects another issue with screen triggers being retained across reboots.

Also, I know this should be obvious, but if your machine won't do 3D acceleration these compiz plug-in's just plain don't work

Here's a backtrace from when the options get reset, but I can't quite make sense of it. It looks like compiz gets notified that the gsettings key 'org.compiz.core close-window-key' (which I can't find in dconf-editor!) got changed. As a response to that it sets 'org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings close' to the new value (which happens to be the default value), thereby overwriting the user-set value. Which I think would be a terrible idea even if the user had intentionally changed close-window-key.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 964270, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

@Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt) That bug is for keyboard shortcutsa while this one is for scale and expo settings (mouse bumping a corner, top, side or bottom of screen). This problem was traced for 12.04 but reappeared with 12.10.